NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is \u201cabsolutely doable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks, and doing them well,\u201d said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. \u201c(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Koch made her comments on Thursday during the crew\u2019s first news conference since returning to Earth on April 10. Their mission, a smashing success, tested a NASA rocket and spacecraft on the first human flight into deep space in more than five decades. It represents the opening salvo of NASA\u2019s Artemis campaign and comes amid significant changes to the program.<\/p>\n
Only a week before the Artemis II mission lifted off, when the crew was already in quarantine, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the space agency was pivoting away from a lunar space station to a surface base. Moreover, he said NASA would aggressively work to develop this lunar base in three phases over the next decade.<\/p>\n
Koch said this announcement energized the crew and the mission.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were very much lifted up by the notion that we would get to contribute to astronauts doing this all over again, much sooner than we thought, and that we were going to be focused on the Moon base, on surface operations,\u201d Koch said. \u201cWe are feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Koch said one thing she and her fellow astronauts learned was that they were well-trained to handle whatever issues arose.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis mission taught me that the unknown is way scarier than the known,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery single time we accomplished a mission test objective, we all looked at each other and were like, \u2018 That actually went pretty well.\u2019 That was actually not necessarily easy, because it took a ton of work, but it was easy to accomplish as a team because we had put in the work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another crew member, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, said that as NASA takes further steps into deep space, including setting up a lunar base, astronauts and the teams supporting them on the ground must be ready for a potentially bumpy ride. And, he said, astronauts have to be willing to embrace that risk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to just trust that we will figure it out in real time,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go; we\u2019re going to have to trust each other. It was very evident to us out there that this one went really smoothly. I\u2019m not surprised\u2014extraordinary team. But it was also very clear to us that it could get real bumpy, real fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mission\u2019s commander, Reid Wiseman, said he had a technical epiphany 250,000 miles from Earth. He felt a strong urge to land on the Moon, and if they\u2019d had a lander, they would have eagerly done it. The Moon, he said, was right there for the taking.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not\u2014oh, I\u2019m gonna eat these words\u2014it\u2019s not the leap I thought it was,\u201d Wiseman said. \u201cIf you had given us the keys to the lander, we would have taken it down and landed on the Moon. It\u2019s going to be extremely technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it\u2019s doable soon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is \u201cabsolutely doable.\u201d Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5942,700,323],"class_list":["post-44019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artemis-ii","tag-moon-base","tag-moon-landing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}